AND SO, ON CERTAIN SPECIAL evenings, Jocelyn Grimes will hand a small black plastic box to her partner in life and marriage, a fellow named Tony Saurini. Tony is thirty years old, a lovable, bookish, regular sort of man, living proof of the slogan on his T-shirt: CHICKS DIG SCRAWNY PALE GUYS. Jocelyn, she's twenty-six, a sort of everygirl next door, only with extra brains and a shot of smart aleck. She's sporting a black T-shirt and a long black skirt, with her medium-length brown hair pulled back with bobby pins. She married Tony in '99 and promised to take his last name if he'd quit smoking. He's working on it. Anyway, this small black plastic box of which we speak, it's about the size of a five-stick pack of Wrigley's. He puts the box in his pocket, and off they go. To a bar, perhaps. Or a movie. The opera.

Oh, and this: On the little box, which contains batteries, there is a button. Tony will press this button whenever the mood strikes, maybe hold it down a few moments, shoot a glance at the wifey. It's a great trust-builder in a relationship, Jocelyn points out. It's also naughty.

Starting to get the picture?

No? Well...

Imagine a pair of thong panties. The sort of elastic, G-string thingie you might expect Elizabeth Hurley to wear on a Brazilian beach. Only, in the place where there would typically be a tiny triangle of fabric, there is, instead, a flat piece of soft purple plastic molded in the shape of a butterfly. It's about a half inch thick, with perhaps a four-inch wingspan at its widest point, and there is a plastic tail at the bottom that curves backward and upward, protruding about one inch. Inside this plastic butterfly is a tiny electric motor and a receiver. The receiver is activated by depressing the button on the small black plastic box in Tony's pocket, which, it turns out, is a wireless remote control with a range of twenty-five feet. Upon such activation, the motor causes the butterfly to vibrate. It's not so quiet that it would be inaudible in a board meeting, most probably, but it's more than quiet enough to be employed covertly in a bar. Or in a movie theater. Or at the opera.

And this activity, which some women might find intrinsically worthwhile, is even more rewarding for Jocelyn Grimes because, you see, she's getting paid for it. Almost six figures.

Now, then: Jocelyn is not just some wanton minx (with a lucky husband, you're probably thinking). She is, as it happens, in the employ of Xandria, one of your larger and more respectable mail-order vendors of sexual equipment. And just as the retailer of spigots or clown suits or trampolines must decide which spigots or clown suits or trampolines to carry, so too must the seller of vibrators.

Enter Jocelyn. (No jokes about entering Jocelyn, please.)

It is Jocelyn's job to review latex novelties. That's correct: to test-drive sex toys. That is what she does. (Oh, all right. That's not the only thing she does; she is also the executive producer of the company's e-commerce site, but isn't the toy-testing part somehow more arresting?) Just as Consumer Reports slaloms Isuzus on test tracks, much the way Roger Ebert scribbles about the latest Robin Williams pearl, Jocelyn draws a hot bubble bath and cracks open a fresh pack of Duracells. (An aside: Just broke my rule about using the words bubble bath and Roger Ebert in the same sentence. Sorry.)

She checks for noisiness. She gauges the variability of speeds. She ponders whether a product is something she would want, whether it makes her motor run hot, whether it buzz-buzz-buzzes her smoothly along the tricky journey to the Big O. She notes the quality of materials and workmanship, the ease of cleanup, and the possibility of electrocution where the sun don't shine. She estimates the extent to which Exhibit V can take a lickin' and keep on tickin'.

We're going to need to say this sooner or later here, as we go about considering a person who masturbates for a living, so we might as well do it now: Nice work if you can get it.

And, no, you cannot get it if you try.

IN THIS HORNY DAY and salacious age, truths about sexuality are revealing themselves all the time. Among these is that satisfaction can be a more complicated proposition for women than for men and that not all men are equally equipped or inclined to fulfill all of those needs. That being the case, many, many women--more women than ever before--indulge in battery-powered shenanigans, including women you might not expect to indulge in such naughty things: single women, married women, beautiful women, homely women, your aunt Ruth.

It's a natural part of this industrywide maturation to institute more modern business practices. Getting a listed phone number, a slick Web site, a secure server, that sort of thing. Printing labels with something vaguely scholarly sounding, like Inwardly-Outwardly Research Consortium. And, most important of all--in a business that's never had any shortage of products that work once and konk out or purport to look exactly like Loni Anderson but vexingly do not--selling no crappy stuff.

Here's how it goes: Every couple of months, Jocelyn and a group of Xandria staffers file into a conference room. In the middle of the conference-room table, there typically will be a pile of about fifty colorful, shrink-wrapped items to be considered for sale. About half the items go immediately into the "no" bin. ("Some of them are so unusual, we have trouble figuring out just what you're supposed to do with them," Jocelyn says.) A few get an immediate yes. And ten or fifteen of them become maybes. It's the maybes that they rip open and whack against the table, whose battery compartments they peer into, whose power cords they yank on.

Thing is, when you're checking out a vibrator, "it's hard to tell if the vibrations are overpowering just with your hand," Jocelyn says. "The hand is not nearly as sensitive as any part of the body where you would actually use a vibrator." Further investigation is warranted. Which is to say, we mean, for the safety of the commonwealth, hell, somebody's got to do it.

"The first thing you do is you see how loud it vibrates," Jocelyn points out, "because some of these things sound like lawn mowers, you know?"

ON THE SHELF beneath the night table on Jocelyn's side of the marriage bed is a box. It is a pretty box covered with colorful flowers and butterflies. Jocelyn chose a pretty box because it was her intention to keep it out in the open and at the ready, rather than in the sock drawer or under the bed. This box houses Jocelyn's collection of toys. "Keeps the cat hair off 'em," Jocelyn notes. There also are two submersible models that hang from the faucet over the bathtub, a smooth blue one and an oscillating sponge. She hides the bathtub toys if kids are coming over.

Jocelyn and Tony live in San Francisco--you mighta known--near Alamo Square and the Lower Haight. But it's not as if they've been slouching toward Gomorrah all their lives. They have a clean, spacious apartment with no visible hooks in the ceiling or nudes on the walls. They have two cats. They drive a blue Toyota Echo. In the tape player of this Toyota Echo, there is a recording by the pubescent teenybopper artists Hanson.

"She is so into Hanson," Tony says.

Considering where Jocelyn has gravitated careerwise, you might figure her parents for either lefty polyamorists with a bong on the coffee table or 700 Club disciples who might refer to breasts as "dirtypillows." Not so. To her way of thinking, she had a distinctly normal home life in western Pennsylvania, in a town called California. There was an actual picket fence around her house, and this fence was actually white. There was a station wagon. She had never been anywhere near the "adult industry," Jocelyn says, except to look at magazines. "I had a lot of foster brothers," she explains.

Mom was a high school math teacher; Dad was an English professor. Being educators, they were comfortable talking about sex as long as the discussion had nothing to do with the family. (They obviously wouldn't enjoy this article much, so how about nobody shows it to them, please.) "I never even got a birds-and-the-bees talk," says Jocelyn. Mom tells friends her daughter works "on the Web," which is absolutely true. Tony, who also works on a Web site, as an applications developer, comes from upstate New York, where his friends and family remain "pretty whacked-out" over his wife's job; as such, Tony brings it up whenever possible.

When it comes to sexual history, Jocelyn's track record is pretty conventional. She lost her virginity at a very young age (thirteen), not out of any sexual precocity but more so because of small-town boredom, she says. She did not come into her own sexually until she was a student at Indiana University in Bloomington. That, too, was when she first had sex with, well, herself, having received as a gift a copy of sexologist Betty Dodson's famous book Sex for One. And only in those college years did that solo hanky-panky first result in what a fella might consider fruition. "You know, I rarely orgasm even now during intercourse," she says. "I don't think I ever did as a teenager."

Jocelyn got her degree in English lit (academic scholarship, full ride--told you she's a good girl) and headed for San Francisco's then-fecund job market. Her intended career track certainly didn't involve grown-up novelties; actually, her first job was about as close to the opposite as you could possibly imagine: working for Arthur Andersen. "Fabulously boring," she recalls.

In July of '99, she saw a Xandria ad for an online catalog manager. She figured a company that sells the Christy Canyon Ultimate Masturbation Kit--how stuffy could it be? She got an interview.

Once inside the office building (just two streets south of Bush Street, which would seem something of a missed opportunity), she found herself across a desk from two male VPs. One of them handed her the catalog and asked her to pick out her five favorite items. And then to explain why she liked them.

Then she was told to stand in the middle of the office and holler the names of several Xandria products at the top of her lungs, with vigor and enthusiasm. This is hard. Imagine yelling anything, anything at all, in the middle of a workplace bustling with employees, let alone doing so when you're a nervous job applicant.

Let alone when what you have to yell is "Anal Invader Cock Cage."

Picture little Jocelyn in her interview clothes, less than a year off the bus from Indiana, yelling the following:

"Soooooooper Beaver!"

I mean, you have to be comfortable discussing the inventory.

"Cross Your Heart Titalizer!"

When you think about it, actually, it's a hell of a job-interview icebreaker.

"Deepspaceprobeschoolmarmslapperexpandingwonderplugjellyclimaxknob!"

Professor Higgins, I think she's got it.

"The other day we made somebody yell, 'Giant Jelly Mondo Anal Balls!' " Jocelyn recalls fondly. "If you're not going to fit in here, we need to know right away."

She got the gig, of course. And when she called her mom, she employed a bit of spin, as you might imagine. "I kind of couched it as a very good job opportunity, that it was a financial increase, a dot-com," she says. (This was back when "dot-com" was a good thing.) "They were not going to want to hear about the eleven-inch dildo that I was trying to market on the Web."

FRESH SURGICAL-GRADE-LATEX sex toys smell curiously sweet and faintly familiar, a bit like strawberry Jolly Ranchers, especially when there are a great deal of them in the room. Such would be the case in this room, a clean, windowless office at Xandria. On the floor are eight boxes, each about the size of a microwave oven. In the boxes, there are sex toys. Hundreds of sex toys. Brightly colored, jolly, jiggly, veiny, silly, cellophane-packed pervert fodder--I mean that in the nicest way--tumbling onto the floor, waiting to be photographed for catalogs. There are plugs, vibes, pumps, and sleeves. There are dolls, rings, and whips. There are jellies, oils, and lubes.

Jocelyn first embraced toy-testing duty about six months into the job, during one of the new-product sessions. Her boss held aloft a Pearl Panther vibrator, which came from a manufacturer that Xandria had not dealt with before. Jocelyn stepped up. She was pleased. "I enjoyed it," she says. She enjoyed it enough to keep it. "It makes me happy," she says. You can still find it on the Xandria site, as it happens. "It's got a little kitty on it," she points out.

Since then, she's slipped beneath the sheets or into the suds with scores of appliances. At the office, she is known as a woman whose husband will participate in such research trials, and thus she is often asked to take home couples-related items, like Good Head gel ("kinda tingly on the ol' penis," Tony volunteers). She conducts her inquiries in the bedroom, like most folks, "unless we're feeling particularly randy and we can't make it to the bedroom," she says. Or she might do so sans Tony, by herself, alone, in the bath, if the product is waterproof.

"We need something with nubs here," Jocelyn says absently. She is searching for some of her favorites. "I'm kind of looking for toys that are going to be able to do things that my husband can't do."

The Jack Rabbit, for example, at $44.95, is a multicolored, seven-and-a-half-inch jobbie that can do things Tony and you are never going to be able to do, unless you are, say, bionic. It curves upward at the end (a G-spot curve, they call it in the biz), vibrates, swivels enthusiastically at the tip, and, in a two-inch section about halfway down its length, is stuffed to bulging with hard plastic beads the size of peas that, we're told, present additional midshaft sensations. It also features a second, smaller protrusion near its base shaped like a small rabbit with two ears, which are configured to tickle that external pleasure thingamajig that women have down there. Jocelyn explains, "This little bunny vibrates back and forth, and his ears hit you right on [that external pleasure thingamajig that women have down there]." Jocelyn wishes to throw the full weight of her office behind an endorsement of the Jack Rabbit.

It is tricky, Jocelyn explains, to find the vibrator that is just right. "I like nubs, but not big nubs," she says, "and I like jelly, not smooth, hard plastic. I'm not a smooth, hard-plastic kind of girl. I'm neither here nor there about the G-spot curve, really."

Also: "I'm all about waterproof these days."

Also: "I personally don't like vibrations that are too strong," which one would receive from products described in the catalog as "powerful."

The Ultra Real Teaser, a spiky rubber ring that a man wears to become a living vibrator, sort of, and that pleasures both individuals. "We actually tried this one before it was ever a Xandria product, in its prototype phase," Jocelyn notes. "Now it's one of our Web site's best sellers."

The Doc Johnson i-Vibe, whose design and moniker were obviously inspired by the recent fruity-colored, translucent designs of the iMac. "This little baby was extremely expensive for us to purchase," Jocelyn recalls, "so we wanted to make sure it held up."

And Elegant Pleasures, a less-phallic-looking vibration device that's more for a woman's exterior situation. "Another exclusive I tested in the prototype stage, now one of my faves," she says.

Jocelyn votes to veto easily half the toys she encounters. "The biggest thing is, we look at it and we're like, Does anybody want to use this?"

TONY AND JOCELYN sprawl on their bed before me; it's a wrought-iron canopy job entwined with strings of white Christmas lights. They are wearing clothes. Still, goofily--and I submit that this isn't my fault--my brain is actually saying to itself, This is where it all happens! And then my brain wonders if the nice young couple ever attaches ropes or chains or neckties to the canopy.

For the first time, I notice the edge of a tattoo peeking from Jocelyn's left breast, and I want to ask her what it is, but I opt not to. The reason I opt not to: My brain actually thinks to itself that I should avoid being too personal.

And then I think, why is she smiling like that?

I wonder this as she tells me how women call and write and e-mail and breathlessly confess what they've done with their various and sundry naughty things.

I wonder, as I look at that smile, if anyone really knows what's going on beneath the bus driver's trousers, those judicial robes, that crossing-guard uniform, that nun's (especially that nun's) habit. Some pretty happy things if you'll believe the twenty-six-year-old woman from a tiny town in western Pennsylvania. She'll tell you with a grin that the girl with the far-away eyes may be farther away than you ever imagined.

It's funny in a way, if you think about it. Women, lustily buzzing their way forth into the man's man's man's world, that world that men think they control. Men control this world only if they're passed the remote.